Mid-Flinx (7 page)

As they descended, the roar of the shuttle’s engines was a steady, reassuring thrumming in his ears. He reached back to his childhood, when, as a carefree ward of the tolerant Mother Mastiff, he’d spent days climbing the gnarled evergreens of Drallar’s public parks. Other children might have mothers and fathers, but few had enjoyed his degree of freedom.

As he monitored the
Teacher
’s ongoing observations, he knew he wouldn’t be doing much tree-climbing here. How did one scramble up a seven-hundred-meter-tall trunk? At what height did the incredible growths begin to put out branches?

Something vast and superbly colored swept past the foreport like a shower of stained glass and was gone. The shuttle rocked ever so slightly. Startled and excited, Flinx leaned forward and peered to his left. The flying creature, or whatever it had been, was gone, its chromatic brilliance a fading memory on his retinas. He considered ordering the shuttle to alter course to follow, then decided against it. Where one aerial apparition existed, there were sure to be others.

So there were at least aerial life forms here, he realized, and big ones at that. How had the details of such a world gone missing from the Commonwealth archives? It wasn’t Under Edict, like Ulru-Ujurr. Just forgotten.

And he had it all to himself.

Vibration increased as the engines worked harder, braking against thick atmosphere. Through the port Flinx could make out a riot of color within the treetops, bright patches of vermilion and chartreuse within the greenery. Flowers, perhaps, their shapes blurred by distance and movement.

He leaned back in harness, making certain it was secure. Touchdown was liable to be rough. Below lay no smooth-surfaced shuttleport, no forgiving tarmac, no land-based controller to offer last-minute advice. He had only the
Teacher
’s assurance that a landing was even possible.

Ahead he made out a few rugged splotches of gray rising above the forest, lonely islands in a sea of green. The shuttle’s thrumming became a whine as it switched smoothly from scramjets to VTOLs. Forward motion slowed and it fell precipitously on a cushion of heated air. Flinx closed his eyes.

There was a jolt and his fingers tensed on the armrests. Motion ceased, the whine faded. A deafening silence settled over the shuttle. He was down.

A glance outside showed broken rock cresting against straining greenery less than half a dozen meters from the fore landing strut. There was more open space toward the stern. Coached by the
Teacher
, the shuttle had handled the landing perfectly.

Slipping out of harness, Flinx double-checked the
Teacher
’s original observations. The atmosphere was indeed breathable. Combined with the high oxygen content, the slightly less than T-normal gravity promised easy hiking.

Microbiological screening revealed the presence of several million airborne organisms. This was to be expected on such a fecund world. Detailed sampling suggested the absence of any likely to seriously affect his otherworld constitution. He’d use the airlock anyway, as a safety precaution. Better if possible to keep the shuttle’s atmosphere inviolate. To conserve power he would utilize the foldout ramp instead of the shuttle’s internal powerlift.

When Flinx cracked the outer door, the humidity hit him like a hot, wet towel. The humidity, and the rush of alien odors. These ranged from a sharp suggestion of fine perfume to something that stank worse than an overloaded waste treatment plant.

It required an effort to realize that he was looking out across the top of an immense forest and not at some poorly maintained garden. The actual ground lay hundreds of meters below, and he was standing on a mountaintop, not a rocky outcropping in the middle of a lawn. This knowledge was as energizing as it was disorienting.

Vegetation struck and clawed at the exposed granite, seeking to submerge even this last bastion of bare rock, as if driven into a chlorphyllic frenzy by the absence of any plant life upon the peak. Pip riding easy on his shoulder, Flinx started down the metal rampway. He left the lock ajar. There was no one here to disturb anything inside, and he wasn’t going to wander very far.

At the bottom of the stairs Pip unfurled her wings and soared toward the sun, relieved to be free of the ship’s confines. She needed the exercise, he knew. There was a limited amount of space for aerial maneuvering on board the
Teacher
.

“What do you think, Pip?” She dipped close, wings ablur. “Quite a place, isn’t it? What say we go for a little walk?”

Reentering the shuttle, he made his way to the supply locker and packed a service belt with everything from survival rations to compacted water. Lastly, he snapped on a holster holding a fully charged needler. If the traditions of exploration held true, it was possible that not every life form they encountered would prove amiable. Certainly none would have any instinctive fear of a human.

Besides, he’d learned early on to always enter a strange environment, no matter how outwardly civilized or pacific, expecting trouble. The efficacy of this maxim was attested to by his continued existence.

The belt heavy against his waist, he sealed the inner door, once again opened the outer, and descended the deployed ramp, content in the knowledge that his only means of returning to the
Teacher
was secure. At such moments he was ever mindful of the famous story of the Commonwealth liner
Kurita
. She had been paralyzed in orbit above Terra, a thousand passengers and crew forced to wait impatiently while dozens of engineers and specialists had swarmed her instrumentation and equipment in search of the difficulty.

Only to find that a tiny spider had spun a web not much larger than itself at a critical electronic junction. Flinx had no intention of losing control of the shuttle to such an oversight.

Stopping at the base of the ramp, he once more scrutinized the boundless sea of green. There was a distinct yellow-green tint to the atmosphere that was compounded by the reflective quality of numerous low-lying clouds. Prodigious transpiration from the forest maintained the ambient humidity at near maximum levels. Already he had begun to perspire heroically. The high humidity didn’t bother Pip. Much of Alaspin was also thick with rain forest, though on a much more modest scale.

Strolling toward the nearest patch of vegetation, he felt a muscular thrust from Pip and instinctively dropped, reaching as he did so for his handgun. The minidrag just did manage to interpose herself between his crumpling form and the vast shape plunging toward him out of the clouds.

The reason for its unseen approach was immediately apparent. Despite a wing span of some four meters, it was practically invisible against the limpid sky. Not only its membranous wings, but its bones were perfectly transparent. Only the muted colors of its internal organs and the pale pink blood that coursed through transparent arteries and veins were readily visible, along with the partially-digested remains of an earlier meal.

The swart skull boasted jaws set with backward-curving teeth that appeared fashioned of glass. Three eyes protruded from the wedge-shaped forehead. Evolved for optimum predation, one looked forward while the other two were set off to the sides of the head. This distinctive ocular architecture allowed for more than three hundred degrees of uninterrupted vision, while the fore eye functioning in tandem with either of the others gave the creature excellent depth perception as well.

A third, shrunken wing ran the length of the meter-long body and served as a maneuvering keel in place of the expected tail. Three short, clawed feet provided a solid landing platform.

A more difficult-to-spot aerial predator would be hard to imagine, Flinx decided even as he struggled to unlimber his weapon. Silhouetted against the sun, his attacker would be virtually invisible to prey flying or crawling below.

All this flashed through his mind in an instant, as Pip prepared to counterattack. Flinx instinctively threw up his free hand to protect his face as he fumbled at the recalcitrant holster with the other. Something shattered the air just above him with an explosive pop.

Then he was enveloped by a mass of transparent wings and pulsing organs. The flesh he kicked at frantically as he sought to keep those glass-toothed jaws away from his neck felt like sheets of water-filled plastic.

It struck him then that the creature was hardly moving. When he crawled out from beneath the quiescent mass he saw why.

Its head was gone. Pink blood pumped from severed arteries in rapidly decreasing streams.

“Pip!” He climbed shakily to a crouch. “Pip, where . . .?”

She lay off to his right, on her back. For a horrible moment she didn’t move. Then she twisted onto her belly scales, spread her wings, and fluttered briefly into the air before crashing back to the ground, obviously dazed. He stumbled toward her. His ears rang as if someone had been using his head for a clapper inside a gigantic bell.

Behind him the decapitated alien raptor flopped against the rocks, wings and body twitching spasmodically. Flinx’s first thought was that an explosive projectile had obliterated the predator’s skull. If that was the case, he would have expected a cry of greeting from whoever had fired the saving shot. Nothing of the sort was forthcoming.

Up close he saw that Pip was unhurt, only stunned. Not unlike himself, he knew. Then he saw her tense as she rose to land on his shoulder. He followed her reptilian gaze.

From the body of a huge emergent, just beneath its capacious, shadowy crown, a thick brown cable had emerged. It crept along the rocks, prodding and probing, a second following close behind. At first Flinx thought they were some kind of impossibly attenuated snakes. He soon learned otherwise.

The tip of the nearest cable made contact with the still quivering corpse of the raptor. With a speed that took Flinx’s breath away, the two cables lashed out and contracted. One encircled the dead predator’s body, the other a crumpled wing. Together they dragged the corpse toward the forest.

From his perch atop the exposed rock, Flinx watched as the cables drew their prize across the treetops. At first he thought they originated within the tree itself. Closer inspection revealed that they were retracting not into the trunk but into a large lump on its side that differed only slightly in color from its stolid host. He envisioned a limpet the size of a grizzly.

As he looked on, the tentacles lifted the body toward the pale brown lump. A toothless maw gaped in the side. Flinx found himself wondering if the tree drew any benefit from the lump’s presence. Perhaps in the course of its natural predation it and others like it kept the emergent’s crown free of winged grazers who might otherwise devastate its vulnerable, sun-loving leaves.

He wasn’t about to investigate any closer. The tentacles coiled tight against the lump’s side as the body of the transparent flier disappeared within the receptive cavity. As he looked on, a smaller flying creature approached. It had pink and red feathers, a long neck, and a beak like a roseate stiletto. Skimming gracefully over the top of the forest, it was intent on the branches below.

The instant it entered the shadow of the emergent’s crown, one of the coiled tentacles snapped out. There was a concussive bang, an echo of the sound that had temporarily stunned him and Pip. The feathered flier’s head vanished and the limber body crashed into the treetops below, tumbling once before coming to rest. Another tentacle reached for the fresh catch.

Fortunately for Flinx, the tentacled mass, which he promptly dubbed the whipbump, only seemed to attack airborne life forms. Its perception was directed permanently skyward.

“Remind me not to do any recreational gliding around here,” he murmured to Pip. The flying snake glanced up at him querulously.

He’d been outside the shuttle for only a couple of minutes, and in that time had encountered not one, but two indigenous predators, neither of which resembled anything previously encountered or read about. The initially peaceful appearance of the warm, moist forest took on a sinister aspect. A breeze would have helped, but the air was as still and heavy as an old pot of stew.

He shaded his eyes against the yellow-green glare, acutely aware now that he was dangerously exposed on the bare mountaintop. It was obviously not a safe place to linger, and he’d do better to get under cover. In the distance he could see fuzzy shapes rising and diving above the green canopy. Surely not all of them were predators, but until he was more familiar with the local fauna, he’d do well not to take any chances.

A series of mournful, echoing cries reached him, and he tilted his head back. High overhead a flock of streamlined, cream-colored creatures soared past on prismatic wings. Each was perhaps half the size of his shuttle. Farther to the west a cluster of mewling grazers drifted above the treetops by means of three gas-filled sacks growing from their spines. Multiple legs dangled beneath some, tentacles twitched and coiled beneath others. There were many varieties of these drifters. To his untrained eye they looked like airborne jellyfish.

Not all were ample of dimension. As he stood observing, several hundred gas-bag floaters appeared from behind the stern of the shuttle. Each about the size of his closed fist, they drifted lazily past, their single supportive balloons flashing iridescent in the hazy sunlight.

Their tails resembled the aft wings and rudders of ancient aircraft. Six thin, flexible blades, three to a side, propelled the tiny bodies briskly through the damp atmosphere. Individuals were either azure with yellow stripes or white on purple. Flinx fancied, without any proof, that the color differences might indicate sex. He noted the presence of three tiny, simple black eyes and long coiled snouts like those of butterflies or moths. The six small legs each ended in a clasping hook.

Nectar feeders, he decided. Experimentally, he waved at the school as it floated past, nudging several of the floaters with his fingers. They paddled harder with their fragile wing blades as they struggled to avoid his attentions. Those thus disturbed emitted tiny burbling squeaks. As the melodic discord spread throughout the school, Flinx felt as if he was surrounded by a stately procession of musical soap bubbles.